Staff removal shows chaos in Trump administration

US President Donald Trump has dismissed his recently appointed communications director, Anthony Scaramucci. The abrupt removal of the controversial figure after some 10 days of a crude verbal tirade against other senior staff indicates the tensions rising within Trump’s inner circle. Press TV has talked to Brent Budowsky, columnist of The Hill, as well as Sameera Khan, columnist and political scientist, to discuss this issue.

Budowsky believes the recent staff removal shows that there is “chaos” in Trump’s administration, adding that his presidency is in “big trouble.”

“So what you have is a sequence of firings and removals - the national security adviser, the White House chief of staff, the communications director, the press secretary, there have been a lot of them,” he said.

The analyst further praised the appointment of John F. Kelly as the White House Chief of Staff, expressing hope that he will succeed in bringing back some order out of the chaos and imposing some discipline that would be very valuable and helpful to Trump and to the United States.

He also opined that Anthony Scaramucci was an “absolute epic disaster” as communications director, reasoning that attacking other people in the White House as he did with former chief of staff, Reince Priebus, is not acceptable.

This file photo taken on July 21, 2017 shows Anthony Scaramucci, former White House communications director during a press briefing at the White House in Washington, DC. (Photo by AFP)

Elsewhere in his remarks, Budowsky noted that Washington generally has a problem with conflict of interests, asserting that Trump is taking it to “new epic heights” which is going to get him in a lot of trouble.

He also emphasized that the Trump administration should stop attacking former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton all the time, arguing that what it is doing right now is “wrong and silly”.

The analyst concluded by saying that America’s political system is “dysfunctional", stating that the American people in large numbers have rejected Trump politically and that they want change now.

However, Sameera Khan, the other panelist on the program, maintained that what is actually in chaos is the mainstream media which creates “an absolute frenzy” whenever the president fires one of his staff members.

She also noted that the media as well as the Democratic elites want to portray Trump as “uniquely nefarious” which is the reason why they focus mostly on personality rather than policy positions.

The analyst further criticized the removal of Scaramucci, arguing that he was dismissed from the administration because of being a loud mouth, not his problematic policy positions.

According to the analyst, the “US political discourse has been reduced to celebrity gossip” and that the basis of media coverage is not pro-facts or pro-objectivity.